The Most Common Types of Spam You Need to Be Aware Of

Most of us are victims of spam on a daily basis, from emails to phone call spam, it happens to the best of us. Unfortunately, spam is not just annoying, it can also be very dangerous if you let spammers trick you into believing them.
Here is a list of the most common types of spams so you know what to look out for:

1. Spam comments

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Spam comments are usually found on a blog’s comment section. While they are usually harmless, they can be very annoying. This is a way for people to promote themselves and/or their business. To get into your comments section, they are using a certain type of software that helps them find potential targets and send them numerous spammy comments.

If you want to avoid your comment section being full of spam you should never have them automatically approved, instead it’s best to approve them manually yourself. This way you can chose which comments get posted and which ones don’t.

Solution:

1. One solution would be to install a captcha plugin which would remove all the spam comments at once instead of you having to go though all of them yourself. 2. Another solution comes in the form of an anti-spam plugin

2. Spam e-mails

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This type of spam is quite hard to tackle as once your email is in the hands of one mass spammer- it will have been pretty much compromised. And while Google is pretty good at detecting spam and putting them into their special folder, sometimes important emails can be seen as spam, and they might miss your inbox. This kinds of spam has the potential to be very dangerous as clicking on the wrong link could lead to your device being hacked.

Solution:

1. Again, captchas can be used to get rid of spam emails just like they get rid of spam comments, so make sure you have the plugin installed.

2. Your email can easily be taken from places such as your website. One way to avoid that from happening is by adding a picture of your email instead of typing it up. This way they will not be able to copy paste it and a bot won’t be able to read it or recognise it as an email address.

3. Negative SEO spam

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This kind of spam can be very harmful to your business as it aims to make Google believe that your website is doing dodgy SEO tactics – known in the industry as “black hat” tactics. This is a practice against Google’s guidelines with the purpose of getting your site to rank higher

Solution:

It’s important to keep an eye on your website and its backlinks. If you notice there are links going to your website from a dodgy website, you could use the Disavow Tool in Google Search Console. Through this you can tell Google that you don’t want those links, and they will remove them.

If you’ve been a target of Negative SEO which resulted into a penalty from Google, a solution would be to hire a good SEO company that would help you get your site ranking well again.

4. Bots, Spiders and DDoS Attacks

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DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks are, in simple terms, an abundance of fake traffic sent to your website in a little amount of time. While not particularly harmful, this could overload your firewall, bandwidth and CPU.

Solutions:

1. Again, one way to get rid of this kind of spam is by installing a good WordPress security plugin, which is meant to protect your website and keep it clean of spam. There are plenty of plug-ins available that do a very good job, but make sure you do your research beforehand.

2. To prevent DDoS attacks from getting out of hand, you should check Google Analytics which can tell you if there is a suspicious amount of traffic on your website. You can set up alerts which will make you aware if the traffic is more than usual.

Feature image credit: Tetiana Yurchenko/Shutterstock

Published by Recyclezone on 2019-04-30 09:47Modified: 2019-04-30 11:04:05